


an indirect kiss

by HirilElfwraith



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical spiders, Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), Dubcon Spider Eating, Graphic Depictions of Spiders, M/M, Mind Control, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Unreliable Narrator, Web Jonathan Sims, Web Martin Blackwood, the spiders want jon and martin to kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-07-08 00:36:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19860640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HirilElfwraith/pseuds/HirilElfwraith
Summary: Martin has been dreaming. He can never quite remember the contents of the dreams, but he knows that they ought to be nightmares. He also knows that every time he wakes from one of them, he feels loved.Jon has been dreaming. He's certain that they are only dreams. Why would they be anything else? He has no reason to worry aboutactuallybreaking into Martin's flat every night and gently coaxing spiders down Martin's throat. His subconscious has produced stranger things.





	an indirect kiss

Martin has been having dreams lately. 

He can never remember them, when he wakes up. He thinks they’re nightmares, but they don’t feel like nightmares. Nightmares are nothing new, of course—his old standbys about his mother telling him to leave her alone to die and about being fired from the Institute for lying on his CV have been supplemented now for years with crawling worms and mannequins and any other number of awful things that he’s read in statements, and more and more lately his dreams have been filled with choking, icy fog and squealing static and a grey world full of nothing. 

These are different. Even if they always fade within seconds of waking up, he knows they’re different. 

Jon has been having dreams lately. 

Nightmares, maybe. They ought to be nightmares. He probably ought to be suspicious of them, considering he knows very well the range of horrors he watches every night, and these do not follow the shape of them at all. 

But he likes them, a little. It is so nice not to be helpless. 

They start out normally enough. He is The Archivist, and someone is crying and screaming and pleading for help as they relive the worst experience of their life, and he is watching them with nothing but hunger. He cannot move. He cannot speak. He cannot so much as blink—cannot afford either of them even the momentary relief of not having to bear his gaze. He gave up trying to help a long time ago. Naomi Herne is wailing from the bottom of an open grave, lost in endless silent mist, and he has seen it too many times to care. It’s just routine, now. He watches and watches and watches and he is nothing but infinite, hungry eyes. 

And then the dream changes. He knows that he’s still dreaming. But he’s walking, now, a coat and shoes pulled on over his pajamas, hurrying with a purpose through dark London streets. He knows the way, even though he’s never been here in waking. He can see it laid out so clearly before him in gleaming silver strands of spider-silk. 

The door to Martin’s apartment is locked, but that is no challenge for his clever spiders. Jon loves the spiders, in his dreams. They frighten him, of course, but everything does. Surely nothing has ever loved Jon as much as the spiders do, and Jon wants so dearly to be loved. 

Martin is sleeping, sprawled not quite on his back, shirt rucked up a little to expose his soft stomach, legs tangled in the blankets. He’s frowning, unhappy, and Jon doesn’t want that. 

In the dream, Jon can admit what he wants. In the dream, Martin is _his,_ soft and pliable and lovely, and Jon loves him so much. It is so natural and right and easy to sit next to Martin’s sleeping form, to gently shift Martin’s body until his head is resting on Jon’s thigh. Jon can see him perfectly in the faint moonlight streaming through the crack in the blinds—the scrunch between his eyebrows, the soft curve of his cheeks, the dusting of freckles over his nose. His lips are soft and full and closed, but Jon can open them so easily with the brush of a finger. 

Jon is so full of love. He loves Martin, and he loves all the spiders crawling over him and around him and inside him, and he wants Martin to feel as loved and perfect and safe as he does. The spiders love Martin, too. The spiders will keep him safe. The spiders will not let Martin be lost to Forsaken, where Jon cannot see him, where Jon cannot touch him. 

It is the most natural thing in the world to gently open Martin’s soft mouth, and to let Jon’s beloved spiders crawl inside. 

It should be horrifying, really. But when Martin surfaces from the clinging fog of the Lonely, he is warm and soft and his body feels so heavy, and someone is there for him. 

It’s a dream. It’s obviously a dream. Only in a dream would Jon let Martin’s head lie pillowed on his lap, and only in a dream would Jon murmur such soft things to him. Martin loves Jon’s voice, he always had, even when Jon never talked to him except in a discouraging snap. Jon is not discouraging now. It feels so good to lie there, soft and passive and heavy, and Jon tells Martin, low and adoring, about how much he loves him, about how he wants to keep him safe, about how perfect and good Martin is. 

_I want you to be safe,_ Jon promises Martin, his voice a gentle rumbling vibration. _I need you to be okay. Trust me, Martin. I love you so much._

There is a soft hand carding through Martin’s curls. The pad of Jon’s finger, soft and dry and so wonderfully human, strokes over Martin’s mouth, and something tiny and scurrying passes over Martin’s open lips and inside him. It is not the first. 

This is a dream, Martin thinks, and in this warm sleepy place he can remember that he has had this dream many times before, always full of Jon’s warm human weight next to Martin on Martin’s small lonely bed, and always full of tiny legs prickling over his tongue. Martin ought to care about that, he thinks muzzily, but this is a dream, and Jon’s touch is so adoring, and Martin has been so terribly Lonely. 

Martin surfaces enough to make a tiny noise up at Jon, manages to crack his heavy eyes open just enough that he can peer sleepily through his eyelashes. 

_Shhh, Martin,_ Jon murmurs, and bends close, so close that Martin can feel Jon’s soft breath on his face. _Shhhh. It’s going to be okay. Trust me, darling, I love you so much. Go back to sleep._

Jon opens his mouth, scarcely an inch from Martin’s, and his fingers cup Martin’s slack jaw gently and coax it open, and from this angle Martin can just barely see the long, hairy legs pushing between Jon’s lips as a spider nearly the size of Martin’s palm delicately steps down and slips into Martin's yielding mouth. It is enormous, still wet with Jon’s saliva, and Martin can feel every tiny barbed hair as it creeps between his teeth and gently down over his tongue. 

_Lie still,_ Jon whispers against Martin’s lips, and strokes gently down the column of his throat, and Martin does not gag or cough or panic as the spider crawls down inside him. He ought to, maybe, he reflects distantly. But Jon is here, and the spider came from him, and Martin loves Jon so much. It feels good, in a way, to have it inside him, something of Jon’s he can keep with him now and forever, an indirect kiss that has come to live somewhere in the spaces between his tissues that are now full of crawling things. 

_I love you so much,_ Jon promises, gently presses a kiss to Martin’s forehead, and Martin sighs through a throat full of spider-silk and drifts into warm slumber. 

Martin wakes up with a dry mouth and a tickling cough. He’s been dreaming, he knows it. He doesn’t quite remember the content of his dreams, but he thinks it should disturb him. 

But Martin doesn’t feel disturbed. Whatever strange awful things his subconscious has been dredging up, somehow they also carry the feeling of being… _cherished._ He can almost feel the warmth of someone sitting beside him, the ghost of a gentle hand on his hair, a thumb skimming his lip. It’s nearly alien. Martin has never been someone who other people wanted. 

Probably, he should dismiss it, not cling to this phantom connection that visits him in his sleep. But, he thinks mutinously as he rolls over and rubs the sleep out of his eyes, staring at the spiderwebs at the corners of his ceiling, why shouldn’t he treasure it? He’s been a perfect little assistant for Peter, pushing people away, feeding the Lonely with his own solitude. No one else has to know about the soft, shifting feeling of warmth he gets in the pit of his stomach when he thinks about his own secret dreams, especially not the part where he thinks that the voice murmuring indistinct adorations into his ear had been Jon’s. Martin hasn’t seen Jon in weeks, hasn’t talked to him in longer. He can enjoy these guilty little pleasures conjured up by his subconscious. 

The tickle in his throat is washed away with a few drinks of water, and the dream fades to nothing more than a vague sense of forbidden contentment in the back of his mind. 

Jon wakes up with a tickling cough and a spider on his pillow. He blinks at it, feeling absurdly right for just a moment before he remembers that he hates and distrusts spiders, and by then it’s already skittered away out of sight. 

He remembers every detail of the dreams, of course. He always does. Maybe he ought to worry about them. There’s plenty of precedent for dreams he thought were just consistent nightmares to actually be a supernatural force using him to do harm. 

But somehow, he can’t quite bring himself to be concerned. There are enough concrete threats that focusing on what’s probably nothing feels like wasted effort.

In any case, doing something about the dreams might mean that they stop, and he can’t quite admit to himself how much he doesn’t want that to happen. He is so used to hurting people whenever he sleeps, but he’s actually begun to look forward to the time when he can’t keep his eyes open anymore and has to crawl into bed unless he wants to fall asleep at his desk. The dreams are sweet and guilty and _his,_ and there is something so wonderful about being allowed to touch Martin (Martin who has forbidden Jon to find him), to touch him and talk to him and gently fill him up, sweet and unresisting, with all the many-legged manifestations of Jon’s love. 

The tickle in Jon’s throat goes away with a few drinks of water. He brushes his teeth and gets dressed, dreams already pushed to the back of his mind, and when he goes out to have his morning cigarette, he does not think about the golden web-patterned Zippo he uses to light it.

**Author's Note:**

> alternate summary: "average londoner eats 3 spiders a night" factoid actually statistical error. spiders martin, who is lovingly fed dozens of spiders every night by his adoring boyfriend, and who are both convinced they're dreaming the whole thing, is an outlier adn should not have been counted. 
> 
> thanks to the do not archive chat for enabling me


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